To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!

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130. None of us has the power individually...

to change social conditions of systematic oppression and exploitation. Class struggle is a collective struggle. Leftist politics are not about personal choices, lifestyle choices, and individual choices. One can certainly focus on those things but they have nothing to do with political action. Leftist politics are about changing the power structure, class struggle, and recognizing the need for organization, agitation, and resistance. Without organization any individual personal resistance is meaningless. It takes a mass movement to rise up and fight against oppression in any form. None of us have the power to individually produce some alternative system that will break the chain of systematic oppression of the majority of working people under capitalism. It is and must be a collective struggle for any changes to come to pass.


"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. ... If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

--Frederick Douglass